


Sickfic in Two Perspectives Ooh Aah Very Exciting

by taylor_tut



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: Caretaking, Fever, Gen, Hallucinations, Headaches & Migraines, Protective Eddie Kaspbrak, Sick Richie Tozier, Sickfic, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-23
Updated: 2019-11-23
Packaged: 2021-02-26 05:28:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21528334
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/taylor_tut/pseuds/taylor_tut
Summary: so this is a cliche trope but I love it a lot and I’ve never done one so here we go: a fic in which the same story is told from two perspectives. It’s for It Chapter Two! First up is Richie, hallucinating from a fever in his room at the B&B, and the next one will be Eddie and Ben. They’re both a little short, but Eddie and Ben’s will be longer because there’s only so much you can write from the perspective of a delirious person. I hope you like it, and if this is a style you’d like to see again, let me know!! :)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 86





	1. Richie

One Side 

Richie lay on the bed, afraid to put his feet down on the floor for fear that they would melt to it, shivering despite that he was almost sure that It had finally opened up that fucking demon mouth of his and dragged him to hell with his teeth. 

He couldn’t remember how long he’d been sitting there, nor what had brought him up to the bedroom rather than being downstairs, where he could hear the television blaring some movie that the rest of the Losers were probably watching in some failed attempt to get their minds off everything else. Part of him wanted to go downstairs and join them, part of him even told him that he NEEDED to, that he shouldn’t be alone, but his legs felt so heavy and his head was pounding. He couldn’t really find the energy to get up. 

It was all he could do to stay awake for the impending feeling that if he fell asleep, something was going to get him. He closed his eyes, felt them burning—they’d been doing that for a while now—and when he forced them open again, his blood ran cold at what he saw. 

Hands, billions, probably TRILLIONS of them, gelatinous and black and reminiscent almost of the little sticky hands that he’d frequently won in the arcade as a child and then promptly lost to an angry teacher when he would fling them across the room to snatch papers off desks, were reaching up wobbily from the floorboards. At first the movements appeared random, wiggly and macabre but slow and indirect. Richie was almost sure that if he lay completely still, that perhaps they wouldn’t know he was here and could continue reaching their gross, unseeing fingers around until he could think of what to do about it. 

That plan was shot dead in the water by a knock on the door that made them all stand up on end. 

“Richie,” a voice, quiet and annoyed—Eddie’s, he recognized—called. 

The hands mocked him. “Richie!” they shouted in their high-pitched drawl. “Richie! Richie!”

He didn’t reply; he couldn’t.

“He’s probably sleeping,” someone else said, but it didn’t seem to satisfy Eddie. 

“I just want to check on him,” Eddie said, sounding more irritable than concerned. This was a chore for him, Richie knew, and nothing more. “Rich, I’m gonna come in, okay? You’d better be fucking clothed.”

Richie still said nothing, hoping against hope that the others would go away if they didn’t hear him. He was wrong and the door opened slowly and silently. 

He blinked and suddenly Eddie was halfway across the room and looking angry. 

“If you were awake, why didn’t you just open the door?” 

Richie watched the hands on the ground with wide, horrified eyes, afraid to blink again. He forced himself to sit up so he could see them better, but it wasn’t a good choice, as the world spun rapidly and sickeningly around him. 

“Sorry,” he apologized. He felt like he was floating, like he might float away if he weren’t careful. We all float, Pennywise had said, and that was pretty much all the proof he needed that he’d already lost this game. 

“Richie?” Ben called. Gently, he was always gentle. “What are you looking at?” 

He shook his head. “Sorry.”

“Sorry for what?” Eddie asked. His voice was doing strange things in his ears, ebbing and fading like he was listening underwater.

Richie couldn’t tear his eyes away from the floor, but the next thing that he was aware of was that the hands were getting closer and closer until they filled his entire vision with grainy, black darkness as Eddie and Ben shouted his name. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> alright let's take it from the top

Ben had tried to talk Eddie out of going to wake Richie after only an hour of being gone, but Eddie was nothing if not stubborn, so of course, it had been to no avail. Mike had even encouraged it, afraid that Richie may have gone out the window to disappear despite that his car was still parked in the lot in plain sight, and none of the others had said a word. He’d opted instead to begrudgingly go with him. Before dinner, Richie had excused himself to his room, claiming that he needed to sleep off his building headache and fatigue more than he needed food. As a litmus test, Mike had offered to pay for his meal—Richie would never turn down free food. If he’d planned on sneaking away, he’d have postponed that plan until after dinner, so when he’d shook his head and said that he really needed to lie down, they’d given him no further trouble about it. 

Eddie had become antsy the longer they heard nothing from Richie. A few times, they’d been able to talk him out of going upstairs to get him to join the group, but not anymore. 

“I’m sure he’s just tired, Eddie,” Beverly had tried to argue. “We all are. Tired and jet-lagged.”

“It’s only 4:30 in Beverly Hills,” Eddie pointed out. “If anything, he should be up and wired all night.”

“It’s been a long day,” Bill had said. “Just let him rest.”

Eddie had not done that. 

Instead, he’d huffed out a sigh and stomped off, ignoring their discouraging outcry, so Ben had followed. 

“Richie,” Eddie called, knocking surprisingly lightly on Richie’s bedroom door. No response came and the two looked at each other. 

“He’s probably sleeping.”

“I just want to check on him,” Eddie dodged. He was getting anxious, and when Eddie got anxious, he got snippy. “Rich, I’m going to come in, okay? You’d better be fucking clothed.” 

When that didn’t elicit so much as a peep, Eddie held his breath and cracked the door open, Ben following close behind. 

Richie was not, in fact, sleeping, although he was lying face-up on the bed, fully clothed down to his shoes and glasses, and staring straight ahead, opening and shutting his eyes in long, exhausted-looking blinks. Something about it made the hairs on the back of Ben’s neck stand straight up. 

“See? I told you he wouldn’t be sleeping,” Eddie gloated. “If you were awake, why didn’t you just open the door?” 

Richie forced himself to sit up, never breaking his gaze from the floor. “Sorry.”

That. That made Ben’s heart skip a beat. When Richie was younger, and even, it would appear, still today, Richie didn’t know when to shut up. Often, Eddie got the brunt of that personality fault. Richie could always tell the second he’d stepped over the line and not a moment sooner. He’d used to do things to make up for it—letting Eddie choose what movie they’d see at the Alladin and strong-arming the others into seeing what was usually something foreign or documentary, giving Eddie a compliment or two cloaked in teasing words, pretending that he wasn’t hungry for his lunch and giving Eddie his Twinkies. Eddie had always half-joked that Richie would break out in full-body hives if he ever properly apologized, and Richie had usually replied with something about how the only rashes he was worried about were the ones that Eddie’s mom could transmit in bed. 

Upright, Richie’s eyes fluttered, making him look half-conscious. Eddie seemed to notice, too, based upon the worried glance he shot him before Ben knelt down in front of him while Eddie took a seat on the bed. 

“Richie?” Ben called as softly as he could. He got no response, but Richie’s eyes were darting around the floor like he was tracking something that wasn’t there. “What are you looking at?”

Richie’s breathing was loud and fast. God, he had seemed a little off that morning, a little tired and a little distracted, but had Derry really driven him this far out of his mind so fast? 

“Sorry,” Richie apologized again, shaking his head. He was struggling to keep his eyes open. 

“Sorry for what?” No reply. “Richie, hey,” Eddie said sternly, “don’t—!” But it was too late and Richie had already slumped hard and bonelessly into his shoulder. “Holy shit!” he cursed. 

“What the hell is going on? He just passed out?” 

“I don’t know,” he replied. “He’s unconscious.” Together, they got him lying down on the bed again, where Ben raised his feet in the hopes that he might regain consciousness quicker as Eddie tapped his cheeks. 

“You think it’s Pennywise?” 

Eddie shrugged. “Trashmouth!” he shouted. His hands slowed from a slapping motion to being pressed against Richie’s cheek, then his forehead, and Eddie cursed again. “It’s not Pennywise. He’s boiling.”

“He’s got a fever?” Ben asked dumbly, pressing his own hand to Richie’s forehead to confirm that indeed, there was an insidious intense heat there. “Fuck.” He wouldn’t claim to be a doctor by any stretch of the imagination, but he knew a high fever when he felt one. 

“Go get the thermometer out of my bag,” Eddie instructed. “I want to get a read on this.” 

As Ben hurried down the hall, he thought about how rare it was to see Eddie this forceful and confident. It was only ever in situations like these, he remembered from childhood. When Bev fell off her bike and broke her elbow in the ninth grade, Eddie hadn’t so much as broken a sweat delegating tasks to get her help. When Bill had panic attacks in high school on rainy days from the trauma of losing his brother, Eddie had always known just how to ground him. It changed something in him, like waking a sleeper agent. 

Not wanting to dig through Eddie’s crap and disorganize it all (because he KNEW he’d hear about that later), he decided to bring the whole bag down the hall and into the room. Eddie rooted through it for only a moment before pulling out the thermometer, one of those old alcohol ones in its own sheath, and tapping Richie’s face again to get him to crack his eyes open. They’d shifted while Ben was gone so that Richie’s head was in Eddie’s lap. 

“Hey, Trashmouth,” he murmured softly, “I need to know you’re not going to bite down on this. Open your eyes and look at me.” 

“Okay, Eddie,” he managed, though his words sounded distant and weak and his eyes weren’t focusing. “Promise.” 

Eddie seemed to accept that and slipped the thermometer in his mouth, holding his jaw lightly as a reassurance that he wasn’t going to break the thermometer in his delirium, and they waited. It was the quietest he’d ever seen Richie. He wasn’t sure if he’d passed out again or if he’d just fallen asleep, but when Eddie took the thermometer out three minutes later and started muttering under his breath, Richie didn’t stir. 

“He’s over 104 degrees,” Eddie announced. “We need to get him into a cool bath.” 

“Bev! Bill! Mike!” Ben called with some urgency, hoping that they could hear him and could help them carry Richie to the bathroom. “We need a hand in here!” 

Not ten seconds later, Mike burst through the door, fearing the worst, and paused in the doorway while the others filed in behind him. 

“What the hell is going on in here?” he asked. 

“He’s sick,” Ben replied. 

“He’s got such a high fever; it needs to come down. We need help getting him to the bathtub.” Eddie ran ahead of the others while they wrangled Richie’s burning, limp body and carried him to the bathroom, where Eddie had already turned on the shower and peeled back the curtain to let them set Richie inside. The lukewarm stream of the water woke him almost immediately, but it took several minutes for it to bring his temperature down enough for Richie to become coherent again. All the while, he was muttering fearfully, about hands and clowns and voices. It was terrifying, Ben thought, to watch. If he had his way, they’d have called an ambulance and taken Richie to a hospital, but he rarely got his way, and for now, the shower would have to do. 

“Eds?” he asked blearily, trying to rub the water out of his eyes. Beverly had her hand above them in an attempt to shield them, but water was still dripping into his eyes from his forehead. “Wha’appened?” 

“Oh, my God, Richie,” Bev sighed. “Are you back with us?” 

“Why’m I in the shower?” he asked, then looked down. “...In my clothes?” 

“Don’t worry about that,” Ben reassured. “How do you feel?”

“Like shit,” he replied easily. “Head’s pounding. Body hurts. Fuckin’ freezing.” He was shivering violently and it made his already weak voice shaky. 

Eddie reached forward to touch his forehead and his eyebrows knit together as he did so. “Still needs to come down,” he decided. “Can you stand two more minutes in here?” 

Richie hesitated, but finally nodded. “Why?”

“You passed out,” Eddie supplied. “With a crazy fever. You were hallucinating, I think. You were talking to people.”

Richie frowned. “Don’t remember that.” 

Eddie nodded. “Not surprising, based on the fever. What’s the last thing you DO remember?” 

“Uh,” he closed his eyes, trying to think through what had to be a thick fever fog and a migraine, “we were talking about getting dinner. Everything started to get kind of wobbly. Got really hot.”

“You don’t remember talking to us in your room?”

“No,” he replied. “Why were you in my room?”

“We went to check on you because you didn’t come to dinner. You said you didn’t feel well.” 

Richie shook his head. “Don’t remember that, either.”

“Jesus,” Eddie breathed. “I can’t believe you were already that messed up before you went to your room and I didn’t notice.” Before Ben could say anything to try to interrupt the inevitable shame-spiral he was about to embark upon, Bill offered him the bottle of apple juice that Eddie had made him fetch. 

“Oh, right,” Eddie snapped out of it and took the bottle, opening it gently and handing it to Richie with the cap lightly resting on the top. Putting his hand to Richie’s forehead again, he apparently deemed it cool enough to turn the water off. “Drink. You’re dangerously dehydrated and probably hypoglycemic since you haven’t eaten since this morning.” 

“Where did this even come from?” Mike asked. “He seemed fine an hour ago.”

Eddie glared. “Fine?” he demanded. “He barely said two words and he skipped out on a free meal. We should have caught it before it got this bad.”

Richie reached out to squeeze Eddie’s hand and let his head fall against the side of the bathtub. Half his juice was already gone, probably in an attempt to please Eddie, and he was trying to sit up again. 

“M’okay, Spaghetti,” he said unconvincingly. “Just need to sleep it off.”

“What you NEED is antibiotics and probably IV fluids,” Eddie returned. “But we can’t do that, not here, not today.” 

“I’ll go get you some dry clothes,” Bev offered. 

“And I’m gonna run to the pharmacy for some fever reducers. Need anything else?” Bill asked.

Richie shook his head, but Eddie cut him off. “Crackers and vegetable broth,” he said. “He needs to eat and I’m sure he doesn’t feel like a whole meal right now, right?” 

Sheepishly, Richie nodded. “Thanks,” he muttered. “All of you, but mostly you, Eds. I owe you one.”

“Yeah, you do,” Eddie agreed sincerely. “You almost gave me a heart attack.”

Richie just sat quietly in the bathtub and shivered. The burst of energy had been short-lived and it wasn’t long before they were coaxing his semi-conscious body into the fresh clothes and half--dragging him back into bed. 

“Ben, will you stay with him?” Eddie asked after the others had left with Mike to begin modifying their plan of attack to accommodate the time delay and the potential that Richie might not be in fighting shape. 

“You’re sure?” Ben asked. What he wanted to ask was, “I know you want to be the one keeping an eye on him, so why don’t you just do it?” but he was too polite to phrase it that way. Eddie seemed to pick up on it, anyway. 

“They need me downstairs to work on the plan,” he dodged. Ben knew that the real reason was likely that even just being in here was making Eddie’s skin crawl with the perceived germs he was contracting from every surface Richie had touched or breathed upon in the past day. “But he needs someone in here in case the fever spikes again.”

Ben’s heart ached thinking about how disappointed Richie was going to be when he woke up again to find that Eddie had left. 

“Okay,” he agreed. “If that’s what you want.”

“It’s not,” Eddie snapped as if the comment had been passive-aggressive. Maybe it had been. He sighed. “It’s not,” he said, softer now, “but it’s how it has to be. Call me when he wakes up or if he gets worse.”

Ben nodded and sat back to find a comfortable position to watch his friend sleep. He only hoped that he could convince Richie when he woke up silently devastated, just like when they were teenagers, that Eddie cared so much in all the wrong ways. 


End file.
